Fantasy football: Technical glitch had Yahoos crazy

Sunday

Nov 18, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Josh Bousquet Fantasy football

Last Sunday was a dark day for the fantasy football world. Sure, my team lost but I already had been able to endure that a few times earlier this season. The real pain came because I wasn't even able to watch my boys lose this time.

At right around noon that fateful day, the fantasy service on Yahoo! Sports went down. You know, just about when everyone was trying to set their starting lineup. Thankfully, I had that all set, but when I went to check my scores shortly after kickoff, I faced my first defeat of the week as I was told connecting to the server was impossible.

My family was able to pull through Superstorm Sandy without even losing power, but now I was expected to live like it was 1995? This was unacceptable.

This sent the Twitterverse, er, atwitter with upset owners (@KyleClark — Late add to the inactive list: Yahoo Fantasy Football servers) and others whose smugness deserved a virtual slap (@jimmyktown — Apparently, Yahoo Fantasy Football servers have crashed. This is bad for some, good for early lineup setters).

We can only hope that jimmyktown's opponent is a late lineup setter who still pulled out a win.

Some people were able to put things in perspective, though, as @fullsteve made us realize that since “Yahoo Fantasy Football site is down. The Republicans were right; America has officially collapsed. The apocalypse is upon us.” More than one person with a more muddled political and temporal perspective blamed Bin Laden.

Sometime during the 4 p.m. games, functionality returned to the point where I was able to find myself battling from behind. I could have thought of the missed time then as a blessing for giving me those few hours of hope, but instead it felt like I had been robbed of a chance to inflict my anxious hopes onto the world and thus affect the outcome of my players' performances.

Hey, the Bud Light commercials tell me it is possible, which is the most they can do after the huge public disservice of making us sick of Stevie Wonder's “Superstition.”

Instead, I came out of the day down, 101-90, and feeling out of sorts.

I was so muddled that I thought I must have been hallucinating the next day when an email came from head of Yahoo! Sports' Ken Fuchs. Apparently, I had been thinking the word so much that it had manifested itself as someone's last name.

And I'm not very good at spelling.

I have to give Mr. Fuchs credit for admitting in his email that his company “failed” its users.

I was even almost able to forget the whole incident Monday night when my team's concerns changed as quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was sacked out of an as-yet-undetermined amount of games.

Stuff happens, the company offered an apology, it stunk, but what else could it really have done?

Yahoo! decided it would go further, though, returning me to the upset stage.

Another email came to its fantasy football owners Wednesday to explain what happened. They chose to do this to us like 4-year-olds, however, offering up the excuse that some of their “giant machines” that help process game data went down.

Yes, giant machines. Something in it must have fallen down and gone boom.

This email also directed us toward an FAQ web page. Here, I found that it was going to be possible for league commissioners to vacate the week from the standings, which seems fair. I also found out, though, that those participating in the Yahoo! survival pool game would be out of the competition if they had not entered a pick before the outage, which seems unfair.

Still, fear not for Yahoo! is going to make everything all right by giving us free access to scouting reports for the rest of the season. When you click to find out what these reports actually are, though, it's just a positional ranking for the week, with very minor notes on a few players. So our prize is what we could already get for free elsewhere.

That's in the grandest tradition of playing up insignificant game-show prizes — but that's not all. It seems we can get all our Christmas shopping done early, too, as we also get a 20 percent discount on all purchases at the Yahoo! Sports Store through the end of the year.

Apparently, the company thinks that letting us down will compel us to want to give them more money. No matter how good I think I'd look in an Affliction sweater dress (really, it exists), I can't bring myself to feel good about this offer.

Unless, of course, my backup quarterback and I go on to victory this week. Then I may feel a lot better and more comfortable sporting my new Nike Matt Schaub Houston Texans No. 8 Name & Number T-Shirt — Navy Blue.